The
Johnny Depp Zone Interview
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Johnny Depp: Girls' Best
Friend

By Johanna Schneller
Rolling Stone Magazine
December, 1998

“I
hope this isn’t going to be about that teen-idol bullshit.
We’re
really sick of that shit.”—Jeff Ballard, press agent for
Johnny
Depp

Bobby
Sherman. David Cassidy. Davy Jones. Shaun Cassidy. Each name is a
step in the funeral march of burned-out television heartthrobs. Johnny
Depp, 25, currently holds the pole position in budding
fantasies all over North America, thanks to his lead role on the Fox
Broadcasting Company’s baby-cop show 21 Jump
Street. As Tom
Hanson, a copy who goes undercover in high schools to break up drug
gangs and pornography rings, Depp is a sexy guidance counselor, the
older guy in every neighborhood who takes you around and shows you
the ropes but keeps you out of real trouble. And he has everything
that makes little girls wriggle: a forest of eyelashes, sensitive
eyes, spiked locks stiffened with several hair-care products of the
Eighties, dangly earrings.

But
Depp doesn’t want to be a teen idol. “I
don’t want to make a
career of taking my shirt off,” he says.
“I’d like to shave
off all my hair, even my eyebrows, try it that way. I don’t
fault
the TV stars who do teen magazines. They took hold of their
situations, took offers that gave them the big money fast, but they
were dead in two years. I don’t want that.” The
ironic thing is
that Depp didn’t have to do TV. Four years ago, with no
acting
experience or training, two days after his first audition ever, he
got a lead role in A Nightmare on Elm Street, followed
by a
small part in Platoon. So why TV?

I’ve
been asking myself that question for a long time,” Depp says.
“To
be honest, I took Jump Street because I thought it
would only
last a year. I liked the pilot, and I wanted to work with Frederic
Forrest (who was in the original cast), so I said Yes.”
Surprise,
surprise, the show is a hit; Forrest leaves in the first season, and
Depp is locked into a contract. “I wouldn’t do
another TV
series,” he says, “but at least this one means
something. It’s
not another three-kids-sit-in-a-bathroom sitcom. The scripts help
people. But the minute they make a Jump Street lunchbox,
I’m
gone.”

Historically,
when a show becomes really popular, actors turn into giant assholes,
but not Johnny,” says Patrick Hasburgh, creator of Jump
Street. “He once lit his underwear on fire in the
middle of the set, but
that was because no one had cleaned up his motor home in a long time.
The show’s success may prevent Johnny from taking feature
offers,
but he’s being cool about it, cooler than I’d be in
his shoes. And if I were his age and looked like he does, I’d
be dead by now. Girls follow him everywhere, screaming.”

Boys
buy posters of their idols. Girls put it in writing. “More
than
Mike Fox, more than Charlie Sheen, more than Rob Lowe, Johnny Depp
gets the greatest volume of mail of any of our clients,” says
Spanky Taylor of Fan-Handle, a Los Angeles mail service.
“I’d
say 10,000-plus pieces a month. Of course, TV guys always get more
than film guys.”

It’s
not all pictures of girls in their underwear (or less), though Depp
has gotten a few of those. “I’ve also gotten weird
letters,
suicide letters, girls threatening to jump if I don’t get in
touch
with them. So you think, ‘This is bullshit,’ but
then you think,
‘What if it’s not?’ Who wants to take
that chance? I write
them back, tell them to ‘hang in there,’ if things
are that bad,
they have to get better. But I’m not altogether stable
myself, so
who am I to give advice?

“I
lost my virginity somewhere around age thirteen. I did every kind of
drug there was by fourteen, swiped a few six-packs, broke into a few
classrooms, just to see what was on the other side of that locked
door. Eventually you see where it’s headed and you get
out.”

Born
in Kentucky, raised in Florida by an engineer father and a
housewife
mother (now divorced), Depp bought a guitar at age twelve, joined his
first band at thirteen, dropped out of school at sixteen, took his
fifteenth band, the Kids, to Los Angeles, survived a failed marriage
(“It wasn’t working out, so we took care of
it”), and lucked
into the movies. Now he hangs out with Nicolas Cage and Charlie
Sheen, sleeps late, wears motorcycle jackets and ripped jeans and
bangs out “loud, raunchy blues” on his guitar. His
answering
machine message recently was a hung-over-sounding voice mumbling,
“I’m out out out out out out out out.”

But
Jeff Ballard is right: ultimately, this teen-idol shit isn’t
very
interesting. The really big question about Johnny Depp is whether he
can ride it out, whether he can be Frank Sinatra instead of Frankie
Avalon. “Everybody compares everyone to James Dean these
days,”
Depp says. “If you’re lucky, they mention Brando or
De Niro or
Sean Penn. It’s like they have to compare you to somebody.
They
invite you to put on an instant image.”

For
now, Depp seems content to date around, hang out, work on the show
and reject bad offers. “It’s easy to make a million
bucks in
this business doing stuff that would exploit the piss out of
you,”
he says. “It’s like fast food. Get in frame, get
the product
out there, and sell it quick.” Instead, he directs
public-service
announcements (his first ran after an AIDS-related Jump Street),
and he is about to make his first film, a fifteen-minute short titled
Every Cake, Neil, from a script he co-wrote;
it’s about “the
things people can do to screw each other up.” He wants to
make a
movie of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and
eventually cut a
record. “I could do a Bruce Willis thing and make a record
now,”
Depp says, “but it would just milk my teen-boy, pop-idol
image. I’d rather do nothing than do that.”

Maybe
all those dreamy little girls are on to something. Somehow they
sense that in an unpretentious, unself-conscious way, Depp
doesn’t
mind what anybody thinks. He likes himself, something most long-term
adolescents never do. “My face,” he says.
“I see it in the
mirror when I wash it every morning. It’s an okay
face.” And
it’s not all bad, this teen-idol bullshit. “Budding
fantasies,
huh?” Depp says slowly, not unhappily. “Yeah,
budding
fantasies.” If starring in the restless daydreams of a
thousand
fourteen-year-old girls will get Depp where he’s going, then
that’s
what he’ll do. It’s all just part of the job.